Tesla Admits Its Robotaxis Are Sometimes Driven by Remote Humans

A series of letters sent by autonomous-vehicle (AV) developers to Democratic US senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts sheds the most light yet on the human side of robot vehicle operations. In the documents, submitted to Markey as part of an investigation into self-driving-vehicle technology and released on Tuesday, seven companies, including Tesla, Amazon-owned Zoox, and Uber- and Nvidia-funded Nuro, released new details about their “remote assistance” programs.

All the companies that responded to the senator's office say they use remote assistants—humans charged with responding to autonomous vehicles when they get confused, stuck, or in emergencies. The programs, experts say, are an important part of any autonomous vehicle company’s safety considerations, a backstop for a technology that’s becoming safer by the year but will continue to run into new situations on the road indefinitely.

In a report also released Tuesday, Senator Markey said the new details were not enough. “Every autonomous-vehicle company refused to disclose how often their AVs require assistance from [remote assistants]—hiding key information from the public about their AV’s true level of autonomy,” he wrote. “This information is critical for lawmakers, regulators, and the public to understand the potential safety risks with AVs.”

Markey called on the nation’s top federal road safety regulator to look more closely into autonomous vehicle companies’ remote assistance programs, and said he would soon introduce legislation responding to the “safety gaps” his investigation found.

Remote-Controlled Robotaxis

The responses from the autonomous vehicle developers show that, in one critical way, Tesla is an industry outlier. Six of the firms insisted that their remote assistance workers, who work across the US and even, in the case of Waymo, in the Philippines, never actually drive the vehicles directly. Instead, the humans provide input that the autonomous vehicle software then decides to use or ignore.

Not so for Tesla. “As a redundancy measure in rare cases … [remote assistance operators] are authorized to temporarily assume direct vehicle control as the final escalation maneuver after all other available intervention actions have been exhausted,” Karen Steakley, Tesla’s director of public policy and business development, wrote to the senator. The automaker’s remote assistance workers can “take temporary control of the vehicle" at speeds up to or less than 2 mph and can remotely drive a Tesla Robotaxi at up to 10 mph if the vehicle’s software permits it to do so, Steakley said. “This capability enables Tesla to promptly move a vehicle that may be in a compromising position,” she wrote.

Tesla, which has pivoted its business away from making cars and toward autonomous vehicle technology and robots, launched a small ride-hailing service in Austin, Texas, last June. In most of the 50 or so so-called robotaxis operating today, human safety operators sit in the front passenger seats, ready to take over or intervene if something goes wrong. A handful of the vehicles reportedly operate without safety operators. The automaker says its remote assistants are based in Austin and Palo Alto, California.

Autonomous vehicle developers usually avoid direct remote control of their vehicles for several reasons. Small delays between what a human remote assistant is seeing and what’s happening on the road in real time, even by just a few hundred milliseconds, can lead to slower reaction times, an issue exacerbated by network latency. This increases the potential for accidents. “Your ability to drive a car without being in the car is only as stable as the internet connection that connects you to it,” a self-driving-vehicle engineer told WIRED last year.

(Speed and accuracy are important for companies that don’t have employees directly driving remotely, too. In January, a Waymo remote assistant incorrectly told an Austin-based AV that it could illegally pass by a school bus with its stop arm extended, federal investigators found.)

Remote assistants actually operating cars also need immediate and complete situational awareness and a driving setup that feels natural even a thousand miles away. Some industry players also worry that a self-driving car that’s driven by humans even occasionally—and therefore dependent on humans on some level—may not be able to operate safely without them. “When the truck is driving down the road, it needs to be able to operate safely with or without those remote support people,” Chris Urmson, the CEO of the self-driving trucking company Aurora and a veteran of Google’s self-driving-car project, has said.

Markey wrote that Tesla’s refusal to share more specific information about how often its remote assistants take over the car “is especially concerning,” because the workers “are permitted to teleoperate the vehicle."

Missy Cummings, a professor of engineering who researches autonomous vehicles at George Mason University and recently wrote about remote assistance, says developers have an incentive to keep quiet about their programs. “Companies don’t want to give those numbers, because then it would make it clear how not-capable these systems really are,” she says. “If people understood how often [the assistants] were interacting, then it would be clear how far away truly autonomous vehicles are.”

Steakley, the Tesla official, wrote in her letter to the senator that answering some of his questions “would necessarily reveal highly sensitive trade secrets and confidential business practices” that are "fundamental to maintaining [Tesla’s] competitive position in the AV industry.” Tesla, which disbanded its public relations team in 2020, did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Waymo released its own response to Markey earlier this year. In it, Waymo vice president and global head of operations Ryan McNamara wrote that Waymo’s remote assistance agents “provide advice and support to the Waymo Driver but do not directly control, steer, or drive the vehicle.” The company said that at least 70 assistants work at any given time to monitor some 3,000 robotaxis across 10 US cities. It said half of its remote assistance workers are located in two cities in the Philippines and are licensed to drive there but trained in US road rules.

Markey’s office wrote that “overseas remote assistance introduces unnecessary risk to Waymo’s operations—risks that no other AV company is taking.”

Waymo and Nuro declined to comment. Zoox didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment.